State of Blockchain Study: Interest and Adoption Rise as Middlemen Move Out

SAP is unsurprisingly bullish on Blockchain. Throughout the course of the year, SAP has grown its community of customers and partners, and often seeks their feedback to determine if they’re seeing the same trends that SAP is observing.

As part of an enterprise blockchain study, the results found that many in the industry share in our optimism.

Customer Momentum

The results are almost unanimous: 99.5 percent of respondents view blockchain as an opportunity, up from 92 percent of respondents from earlier this year. Eighty-four percent are currently engaged in blockchain-related activities, the same percentage as SAP’s Spring 2018 report and a PwC study from August. What was promising six months ago has solidified throughout 2018: Interest is universal, and adoption is tangible.

Industry Diversity

Adoption is also diverse, SAP found a variety of industries actively driving use cases. In prior years, blockchain’s mainstream perception was synonymous with cryptocurrency. Nine months later, cryptocurrency values are fluctuating, while business cases are more popular in supply chain and increasingly in corporate finance.

In the supply chain, SAP’s grown its customer base through global track & trace, especially for pharmaceutical companies, transportation management and farm-to-consumer solutions. But SAP also sees growing potential to support the corporate finance function. Respondents ranked streamlined financial transactions – including audits, taxes and regulatory transparency – as their most important SAP blockchain use case.

Variety also applies to the internal stakeholders responsible for driving adoption. The most common stakeholders were individual line-of-business executives, followed by the CIO/IT department, offering another indicator of blockchain’s growing reach within the enterprise.

Intermediary Consolidation

While adoption and interest are both on the rise, there is another widely recognized benefit of blockchain adoption: the reduction of unnecessary intermediaries across existing business processes. Ninety-three percent of respondents see the “middleman” in various industries getting left behind, ultimately making intermediary services redundant in the next 5-10 years.